“What do you think?” Adam asked.
Walker sighed. The plastic sheeting rippled with a gust of wind that traveled all the way through the ruin of the ark. Despite the breeze, the air felt thick and close, suffocating. “What I think is that you never should’ve opened it outside of a controlled environment.”
Meryam stiffened. “As far as we were concerned, this was a controlled environment. The other remains on the ark had been exposed for days before we arrived and they are in the condition they’re in. We had no reason to expect—”
Father Cornelius pushed past Walker and strode up to the box. Bitumen crunched under the priest’s boots as he got his first good look at the cadaver. For a moment he appeared to hold his breath, then he faltered. He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and came out with a full rosary twined around his fingers, kissed it, and began to whisper a prayer that came as naturally to the man as breathing.
Walker sighed. “Father, come on. I asked you along on this jaunt because I expect more from you than that. You’re a scholar, not some prehistoric shaman.”
The priest held up a finger to hush him, muttering the last few lines of the Hail Mary. Then he shot Walker a grim stare. “Better safe than sorry. Which is the reason I’m glad they opened the box up here on the mountain.”
“You think this thing’s going to rise from the dead and go on a rampage?” Walker asked. He glanced again at the horns, the dry, leathery skin at their bases, where they jutted from the cadaver’s forehead. “You really think you’re looking at a…”
He left the last word unspoken. Sweat dried on his skin, beginning to itch. They both knew the word Walker had avoided.
“You think that’s impossible?” Father Cornelius said. “I certainly do not. But even assuming this is just some deformity, there are other concerns. The body is better preserved than the other remains. It could be rife with diseases we’re not ready to treat. A coffin, yes, but it could be a Pandora’s box.” He glanced at Adam. “Don’t mistake me, it was borderline idiocy to open the box here, no matter how excited you or your documentary producers might be about the moment of discovery. But better to do it wrong here than wrong somewhere more civilized.”
When Meryam spoke next, it was to the camera. If she needed to defend her actions, Walker knew, it was to her audience and not her present company.
“Initially we had planned to wait for Dr. Walker’s team from the National Science Foundation before we opened the tomb. We photographed all of the symbols engraved on the exterior, removed and preserved the bitumen casing in pieces as large as possible. In doing so, some of the pitch used to seal the lid to the coffin broke away, and…”
Meryam smiled shyly, working the camera, knowing the audience would be on her side because she had given them what they wanted.
“Curiosity got the better of us,” she confessed, finally turning that shy smile toward Walker and Father Cornelius. “We sealed off the area and only select members of our staff have been inside the tenting. Yes, we removed the lid and took samples of the wood, but no one has touched the body itself. We took what precautions were available to us. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t have opened it yourself, Dr. Walker? With some of the seal breaking away?”
What could he say on camera? Of course he would have opened it, but he had years of experience in the field. Saying so would make him look like an arrogant, condescending prick. He didn’t care about alienating the eventual viewers of this documentary, but he couldn’t afford to alienate Meryam and Adam. Not if he wanted their cooperation.
“We all get carried away sometimes,” he said to the camera. “Even without something like Noah’s ark coming into the conversation.”
The entire gathering seemed to hold its breath.
“You’re saying you do believe this is Noah’s ark?” Adam asked from behind the camera.
Shit. “Nothing of the kind. Noah’s ark makes a good fable and the inspiration for some fun children’s toys. Whoever built this ship, he wasn’t called Noah.”
Father Cornelius turned toward Adam. “Now turn your camera off, boy, and let’s get down to business.”
“This is my business,” Adam replied coolly, focused on the priest’s face for a response.
“Walker,” Kim said, her voice a soft rasp.
He turned toward her, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her gaze had locked on the coffin, on whatever part of the cadaver she could see from fifteen feet away. Her whole body trembled, but what troubled him the most was the look of gutting despair on her face. Not fear or panic, but grief. Sorrow so deep it pained him to look at her.
“What is it?” he asked, taking a step toward her.
“No!” she snapped, throwing her hands up, still not looking his way.
Father Cornelius began speaking to her in quiet tones, the kind of soul comfort that he’d been trained throughout his adult life to offer those in pain. Kim squirmed where she stood, twisting as if trying to escape an unwelcome embrace, though no one had touched her.
“What the hell is this?” Meryam whispered.
Adam said nothing, but he caught it all on film. Walker wanted to slap the camera out of his hands.
“Come on,” Walker said, moving toward her. “Let’s get you out of here. I understand this is a lot to take in. I promise, it isn’t what it looks like. But there’s no reason you need to be in here while we’re—”
He reached for her arm, wondering how the UN had chosen a representative who would fall apart like this. Kim began to shake her head, mumbling refusals as she backed away, pushing into the plastic sheeting behind her.
“Walker, wait,” Father Cornelius said.
The buzzing hit him again, the vibration inside his skull. His guts churned and suddenly he’d had enough of this circus. He reached out and grabbed Kim by her wrists, trying to pull her away from the plastic sheet.
A scream tore from her throat and she ripped free of him. She staggered backward, endless despair in those eyes, and then she bolted, dragging the plastic around her, pulling one corner of the makeshift tent down. The others began shouting as Walker put his hands out, batting the plastic away. He shrugged off the suffocating layer just in time to see Kim running into darkness.
“Crazy bitch,” Meryam muttered, trying to prop up the fallen corner of the tent.
Walker swore, racing into darkness as he snapped a flashlight off his belt and clicked it on. Around a corner, he passed the same sort of storage or animal stalls he’d seen elsewhere. Kim lunged through the beam of his torch, banged into a wall, and then whipped past a heavy blanket that must have been hung up by the KHAP team.
Pushing through, Walker found himself in a long, rising passage along the western wall. He raced along, finding himself fighting a frigid headwind. Voices cried out up ahead. He bent forward, scaling the incline of the ark’s broken deck, and moved around support beams that had been put in place only recently.
“Kim!” Walker shouted, knowing it was useless and feeling foolish. Despite whatever had driven her to run, his voice would not be the thing that soothed her.
He clicked off his flashlight. There were plenty of work lights ahead. The chase Kim had led them on had brought him back to the place he’d been standing not long ago, where Helen Marshall and a few others were working to uncover and preserve the remains of three of the ark’s passengers. The British archaeologist knelt on the ground as if to protect the bones of the long dead, but the others had backed away.
They were all watching Kim.
She had gone to the door—the door pinned against the mountain, the door that could provide no exit—and was scratching at it, digging her fingernails into the ancient wood just as these dead people had done thousands of years before. She kept whispering to herself, the same words over and over. Though Walker didn’t speak Korean, he knew the word for “please.” That was one of them.